my dislike of the Google information monopoly and the potential
that a single, corporate entity with financial interests, gets to
censor the information I see. I am sceptical of their
"Do-no-evil" promise because there's nothing binding about it, and
if it gets in the way of money-making, I am sure it'll be discarded
at a whim — if it even still exists.

the awareness that my usage augments their database (although I
am probably too far away from mainstream to provide useful data),
which translates into more funds available to them to further
strengthen their market position.

Of course the name — DuckDuckGo — was perhaps the strongest
reason to switch. :)

I am aware that DuckDuckGo is index-based itself, using the
Yahoo API, which, in turns means
that DuckDuckGo may already be using Bing data. Sounds a bit like out of the
frying pan into the fire, unfortunately.

Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo doesn't quite cut the mustard at all
times, forcing me to go to Google instead. For this reason I am
glad to find that the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension has not
been discontinued, but simply renamed to OptimizeGoogle.

This extension allows me to anonymise my identity towards
Google, remove click tracking (which Google doesn't want you to
know about and hence hide with JavaScript), hide ads, and customise
a slew of other aspects of the giant's search engine. It alleviates
some of the aforementioned concerns, but not all.

Maybe it's time to rethink the way I use the web and lower my
search needs.

If you are using Firefox, try it
out! If you're still using Internet Exploder, you
should not, and instead upgrade
to Firefox. Users of other browsers might find similar
functionality for their application, or might want to switch as
well.